Natural Motion: Euphoria…

Well, in this post (while we are waiting for some more exciting FU news) i’ve decided to give a more indepth look into the new technolgy used in The Force Unleashed, commonly known as, “Euphoria”.

This is a fantasic new technology that is going to change the gaming world.

“Well, you probably Force pushed a stormtrooper or two as Kyle Katarn in a Jedi Knight game, right? Imagine if that stormtrooper was able to stop his progress by grabbing onto a railing and then proceeded to grab a gun beside him and fire back at Kyle—all this because his biomechanical AI simply knew that that’s the best thing for him to do. That’s euphoria in action.”
―Haden Blackman

Euphoria

Euphoria brings Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS) onto Playstation® 3, Xbox 360 and PC.
With euphoria, animations are not canned but are generated on-the-fly by the CPU as the game is played. Every tackle is your tackle, every haymaker is your haymaker.

Previously, animation data had to be manually created (through key-framing) or recorded (through motion capture). This is often expensive and laborious, and results in static, non-interactive data.

Euphoria is instead based on a full simulation of a 3D character, including body, muscles and motor nervous system. This creates fully interactive animations that act and react differently every time.

Euphoria:core

Euphoria:core is NaturalMotion’s lightweight DMS engine. euphoria:core runs parallel to the game’s animation engine and is called by the game’s AI whenever synthesised motion is required instead of canned animation. This enables a non-disruptive integration and scalable use.

Euphoria:core consists of a small kernel, AI controller modules (for adaptive behaviours) and a rigid dynamics module (for physics). euphoria is physics-engine independent and works with all commercially available engines (as well as proprietary ones).

Partners

Euphoria is not middleware. Instead, NaturalMotion has close co-development relationships with publishers and development teams to integrate euphoria into their next-generation titles. This allows clients to hit the ground running and produce euphoria-enabled games within short time frames.

Euphoria is currently being integrated into multiple AAA next-generation console titles, including Grand Theft Auto IV, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Indiana Jones and Backbreaker.